Flight into Fantasy

I’ve been thinking of joining a couple more challenges, both of which are quite different in scope, and so I thought I would use this opportunity to announce my participation in both.

First of all, My Friend Amy, who is among my very favorite bloggers, is helping to organize the Christy Awards Challenge. This challenge celebrates quality Christian fiction, and I admit to being one of those bloggers who’s really, really not sure about that kind of thing. I mean, I read Slacktivist, who does a regular feature deconstructing the Left Behind series, the first book of which I tried to read and couldn’t finish and aside from Narnia when I was a kid and certain classics now that I’m in school, I haven’t read anything else. I’m also a pretty staunch agnostic, and, what with people constantly offering to pray for my immortal soul because God chose to punish me with blindness, I’m not such a huge fan of prosseletizing.

But I don’t want to dismiss an entire genre of fiction out of hand because I don’t have experience with it. I expressed my desire to try some non-preachy Christian fiction on twitter several months ago, with the caveat that I refuse to read anything written by either Tim LaHaye or Jerry B. Jenkins, because I’m fairly sure people watching my head explode would not be nearly so entertaining for me as for other people. And so the Christy Awards challenge (which, alas, does feature several books by Messrs. LaHaye and Jenkins) seemed like the perfect opportunity to find some Christian fiction I’d like.

There are several levels to the challenge, and I’m going to start at the total Christian fiction newbie, which requires me to read… count them… one book. I figure I can’t go wrong with such a non-rigorous amount of work. The one I’ve chosen is Phillip Gulley’s Home to Harmony , because friends of mine were reading that series together on a long car trip. I got to hear parts of one of the books, and found them quite funny. Plus, I believe the minister character is a Quaker, and if I were to embrace any sort of spiritual path at this point in my life, I think I’d pick liberal Quaker.

The other challenge I’m signing up for comes to us from Booking Mama, a blog I wasn’t following until I heard about this challenge from… some other person I have forgotten. She’s hosting the Shelf Discovery Challenge. I recently read Shelf Discovery and adored looking back nostalgically at the books I’d read from my childhood. (I read it during the time when I was woefully behind in my reviews, so suffice to say the book is awesome and you should read it.)

Anyway, this challenge runs from Nov. 1-April 30, and I’m to read six books featured in Shelf Discovery. So here are my tentative picks.

• Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh

• The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (reread)
• Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
• A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• Wifey by Judy Blume
• My Sweet Audrina by V C Andrews (this last because apparently I am a huge, huge masochist and don’t know when to quit.

To connect these two challenges together, the friend who read the Phillip Gulley books is a huge children’s book fan, and so after I read Shelf Discovery I emailed her and told her, quite strongly, that she should run, not walk, to acquire a copy of the book for herself. I know that she did, but sadly, I have no idea if she enjoyed the book as much as I did.